Had Pollak considered the demand for free choice in marriage made by prominent oppositional figures like Charles James Fox, who regularly troped the parental control of children in marriage as slavery and viewed the rules for legal weddings as a diminution of British liberty, she might have supplemented her discussion of incest and slavery with a broader archive more nearly contemporary to Austen's novel. In this sense Pollak's work is suggestive for further work in the cultural history of the family, marriage and sexuality that seeks to treat both fiction and regimes of sex and gender not as epiphenomena of the broader field of political debate, but as key sites in the formation of modern culture.